This is an ART cache. Cache finders have the option to make an artistic drawing on the large logbook, drawing of the furnace or other industrial setting or landscape. This artistic task is not mandatory. Sometime in the future, the logbook will then be exhibited at an art gallery. Paper logbook, oil pastels and color Sharpie pens provided in the cache. You make the art. This is a audience participation art project.
A blast furnace built in 1884, which operated until 1982, and now a National Historic Landmark, Carrie Furnace produced 1000 tons of iron per day. Located on the border between Swissvale and Rankin, Pennsylvania, along the shores of the Monongahela river, it was part of the Homestead Steel Works.
The blast furnaces consumed about 4 tons of iron ore, coke and limestone for every ton of iron produced. The cooling system required more than 5?million gallons of water daily.
Carrie 6 and 7 produced 1,000 to 1,250 tons of iron a day each at their peak. The molten iron was moved in 35-ton ladle rail cars across the river on a special bridge -- the Hot Metal Bridge -- to the Homestead Works to be turned into steel.
The 100-foot high furnaces still stand; now they are a rare example of pre-WWII ironmaking technology. Those furnaces are #6 and #7. The Carrie Furnaces are rare examples of pre-World War II iron-making technologies, the only two blast furnaces from that era that survive in the United States. Carrie 6 is intact; Carrie 7 has been partly dismantled on the 13-acre site. They were constructed of 21/2-inch-thick steel plate and lined with refractory brick to withstand temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees.
Although the site, which is one of the few remaining riverfront brownfield sites in the area, is currently vacant, redevelopment planning is underway. The redevelopment of the site includes efforts of Allegheny County, several municipalities, and the Steel Industry Heritage Council, to historically preserve the mill structure while also utilizing the site for economic development. The plan calls for he furnaces to be refurbished into an interactive museum. The remaining area would be developed using a mixed-use redevelopment plan. Housing, office buildings, a hotel, a conference center and a transportation center are also planned.
At the height of steel production, there were 75 blast furnaces in the region. The best way to describe what the machine was and does is to think of it as a manmade volcano used in the iron production stage of steel making.
While some furnaces were labeled with numbers or letters, others had names. In the Pittsburgh region they were Edith, Isabella, Lucy, Ann, Carrie, Eliza, and Dorothy.
The tradition of giving women’s names to blast furnaces is one that’s steeped in honor but is also a marker of the time.
Naming a blast furnace after a loved one was a way to honor the family. The machinery was a source of pride and ingenuity and progress. When Ann was built in 1899, two existing furnaces on the site were each called Eliza, named after women in the families of steel barons Benjamin Franklin Jones and James Laughlin, the company’s founders. The Carrie name was a family name of one of the initial owners.
The tradition is in the same vein of naming a ship after a woman, going back to the early to mid 19th century.
If you look back in history, riverboats, ships and countries all were referred to with female pronouns. It seems connected to an old practice of English language that assigned gendered pronouns to objects, but that started to die out in the middle ages.
In the example of a ship, there is some symbolism to it as well — that a ship can be a mother figure, protecting and providing for the people on it. So it has that connection to people, like the blast furnaces, and the furnaces have a protective shell.
Humans have a longstanding tendency to anthropomorphize the objects and appliances we use—boats, cars, computers, even electric drills and washing machines. Think of a device, and someone out there has probably given it a human name.
It’s a habit that explains the way humans see their relationships with machines—that is, your relationship with the individual machine you name, and the larger fact that machines do the jobs that humans once did.
Today, the last two working blast furnaces in the state are at Mon Valley Works – Edgar Thomson Plant in Braddock and North Braddock, and those blast furnaces don’t have names.
The lack of blast furnaces today is in part because now there is more steel recycling than steel production, and if you want to see a blast furnace up close, the Carrie Furnaces in Swissvale are the only ones left in this region to visit.
Iron from the Carrie Furnaces became steel that was used in the Empire State Building, the battleship Missouri, the Sears Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Alaska oil pipeline.